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My hand clenches around the tongs. Giulia knows that my family tree is littered with Rosetti men dead before their time. She just cocked a gun with her words and fired it. Straight into my heart.
“Perfect,” I tell her, my jaw grit tight. “I like my snakes where I can see them.”
I toss the tongs down, grab a piece of cucumber from the salad, and stride out of the room. What I really want to do is put a fist through the wall and go out and get blind drunk. I bite savagely into the cucumber and notice there are bottles of red wine lined up on a side table in the dining room.
Or maybe I’ll just get drunk here and make myself everyone else’s problem.
Twenty minutes later, Mia appears in the dining room wearing a blue dress, pacing back and forth as she sets the table, ignoring me as I’m perched on a windowsill drinking a glass of wine. Giulia directs her with sharp words and pointed fingers.
Tomaso, Roberto, and Marzio arrive, and the thug-like men greet their sister with kisses and friendly words. I’m given a few baleful stares. Mia is totally passed over, but she doesn’t seem to be surprised by this and does her best to blend in with the wallpaper.
As we sit down, Giulia gives me an up-and-down look, and her mouth twists in disapproval when she sees I haven’t changed out of my ripped jeans and T-shirt.
I spread my hands and shrug. “What? You said be appropriate. My dick’s not out.”
My wife gives me a dirty look and then turns away.
The four siblings do all of the talking throughout the salad course. I’m sat opposite Mia at the far end of the table, and everyone pretends we’re not here. I have to snatch at the wine bottle every time it comes close; otherwise, I wouldn’t be offered a drop. Mia tries to take a piece of bread, but it all ends up on Roberto’s side plate.
I toast her ironically with my red wine glass. She gives me an angry little shrug, as if to say she didn’t really want bread anyway.
“We need someone to manage those imports, but who?” Roberto is saying to Giulia. “Have you got any ideas?”
My wife’s gaze rests on me for a moment. “No, I can’t think of anyone responsible enough.”
I lift my wine glass and knock the rest back. I’m wasting months of my life with this woman. Once I knock her up I could fuck off, but that means leaving my kid to be raised by an ice bitch who can’t stomach her own daughter. Faber thinks I have no scruples, but that doesn’t sit right with me. It shouldn’t sit right with any man.
I drink steadily as the meal progresses. For a while, I try to play footsies beneath the table with Mia, but she kicks me so hard in the shin that I go cross-eyed for a moment.
As we’re eating our beef stroganoff, Marzio is telling his siblings an obnoxious story about getting a waiter fired for spilling wine in his lap at a restaurant.
“I can’t wait to have a son and for him to turn out like you lot.” I jerk my chin at my wife’s brothers.
Giulia’s lip curls. “Lazzaro, you’re drunk.”
I reach for the wine bottle and top my glass up nearly to the rim. “Not drunk enough. And it’s not Lazzaro. It’s Laz.”
“It’s piece of shit,” Marzio mutters. Mia is reaching for the dish of buttered beans at his elbow, but instead of passing it to her like the gentleman he thinks he is, he picks it up, serves himself, and then puts it down out of her reach. He didn’t do it by accident, either. It was only for a split second, but he looked her in the eye as he took the dish away.
My gaze swings from Mia to him and back again. No one else at the table noticed the exchange. I open my mouth, and Mia anticipates what I’m about to do.
“Laz,” she whispers with a shake of her head, her huge Bambi eyes begging me not to say anything.
But I never was any good at shutting up.
Loudly and to the table in general, I ask, “Why do you all treat Mia like shit?” Everyone goes on eating and talking, but I know they heard me.
I slam my fist on the table and every glass and plate jumps. “I said, why do you all treat Mia like shit?”
Silence falls. The brothers exchange dark glances that say,This fucking guy again.
Giulia glances from her daughter to me. “What are you talking about? My daughter can speak for herself if she has something to say.”
Yeah. Except she doesn’t, and now I’m angry enough to do it for her. I give Mia one last chance to speak up, holding out a hand to her and raising my eyebrows. “Well?”
Mia’s lips are tightly closed as she stares at her plate. There’s no trace of the young woman who talked back to me out by the pool. Why is she so scared around these people?
Giulia gives me a small, sardonic smile, and turns back to her brothers.
